What to Watch Saturday

The “Fast &” franchise goes airborne — and says farewell to Paul Walker — in “Furious 7.” “Meru” follows some fearless types up a stomach-turning blade of granite in the Himalayas. And Rebecca Hall and Jason Sudeikis spar alongside a couple of cute dogs in “Tumbledown.”

What’s on TV

FURIOUS 7 (2015) 8 p.m. on HBO. Vin Diesel, the leader of this franchise’s misfit automotive fraternity, famously predicted a best-picture win at this year’s Academy Awards — “unless the Oscars don’t want to be relevant ever,” he added. We all know how that turned out. Michelle Rodriguez, Ludacris, Tyrese Gibson and Paul Walker are the speed demons, thrill-riding past not one but two supervillains (Jason Statham and Djimon Hounsou) while in the service of some government types (Kurt Russell and Dwayne Johnson). Then there are the cars — driven out of airplanes, soaring between skyscrapers and hurtling over cliffs in digital stunts that “hit the sweet spot of wacky, oh-no-they-didn’t sublimity,” A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times. But a twinge of melancholy occurs whenever Mr. Walker, who died in 2013 before filming was completed, appears on-screen — and especially when his colleagues say their farewells. “They remind you what these movies have always been about, underneath all the noise and the bravado,” Mr. Scott added, “the ferocity of friendship and the terrible speed of loss.”

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Jimmy Chin in “Meru.”CreditJimmy Chin/Music Box Films

MERU (2015) 7:30 p.m. on Showtime 2. Jimmy Chin, an elite professional climber (who directed this documentary with his wife, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi); his mentor, Conrad Anker; and the young Renan Ozturk try to become the first to conquer the Shark’s Fin, a 1,500-foot blade of granite at the top of Mount Meru in the Garhwal Himalaya range in India. Blizzards and avalanches, frostbite and trench foot, and sleeping in a tiny tent dangling in thin air are part of the thrill. “Meru is the culmination of all I’ve done and all I’ve wanted to do,” Mr. Anker explains. The film is so “blindingly beautiful” that it “easily makes you forget that what you are watching is completely bananas,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The Times.

CBS NEWS REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE9 p.m. on CBS. The candidates square off on the issues at the Peace Center in Greenville, S.C. John Dickerson moderates.

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE11:30 p.m. on NBC. Melissa McCarthy hosts for the fourth time alongside Kanye West, the musical guest, fresh off the Madison Square Garden debut of his third Yeezy collection for Adidas and his seventh solo album, “The Life of Pablo.”

What’s Streaming

TUMBLEDOWN (2015) on iTunes. The wary widow of a revered indie-folk singer collides with a pop-culture academic writing a biography of her husband, whose catalog she furiously protects in her picturesque Maine cabin with the help of her two dogs. Rebecca Hall and Jason Sudeikis wield the zingers in this comic story of love after grief.